


Bubblegum Burst

by Whim_Wham



Category: Bubblegum Crisis, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Body Horror, Cyberpunk, Dreams and Nightmares, F/F, Loss of Control, M/M, Nudity, Priss Swears A Lot, Singing, Song Lyrics, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-10 11:39:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 9,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3289007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whim_Wham/pseuds/Whim_Wham
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dark tale sprinkled with enough comedy to keep things from descending into total gloom. It's after BGC 2032, and the post-Priss Knight Sabres and their police associates are caught up in the elaborate machinations of  shadowy villains and their horrific technologies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Surface Tension

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Priss has gone and gotten herself into a mysterious fix with her hijinks in a little understood old Gulf & Bradley combat suit dubbed the _Gaunt_ by the media. Sylia's intelligence suggests that she has limited time to intervene before something horrible happens to her onetime team mate.

Khimera Chang wasn’t a real girl. She wasn’t a natural daughter. She is many things : a contingency device, a stolen life, a lifeline, a puppet. 

****

Priss Asagiri was a real girl. An orphan, she was nobody’s daughter. She is the reflection of the other.

Their meeting wasn’t fated, wasn’t destined: it was devised. 

Unbeknown to them, it was not the first time they had met. 

It would, however, be the last. 

****

Swimming in her rooftop pool, Sylia Stingray thought about leadership. She had always loved sliding through the comforting resistance of water, even before she realized that what it brought her wasn’t animal pleasure, but the refined pleasure of focus. Water was the lens through which her already centered mind could consider life with a clarity few others could achieve. This time the water brought clarity regarding Priss Asagiri. 

She thought about what her disappearance _really_ meant.

Even when she stopped being a Knight Sabre, she was always easy for me to find: I could always follow her musically. A fine eyebrow quirked upwards as she broke surface in a turn at the end of the pool. It was the one part of her life that her downturn had actually improved.' Her last songs had a rough poignancy that were as beautifully jagged as uncut diamonds. Sylia owned the mini-disc, _Shameless Speeds_ , of which the first track, _Flameout_ was, to Sylia, everything you needed to know about the headstrong, nearly indestructible and yet self-destructive woman that she had been both privileged and exasperated to have known, worked with and, on one occasion, slept with.

She slipped long and silently alone the bottom of the pool, a snatch of song playing though her mind :

Love is a painful crimson splash 

Across the hard road's ribbon slash 

Pleasure fleeting as the dream of speed 

Dies according to the throttle's need

'Where did you go, Priss, that I can no longer find you? Who is it that stopped your singing ; how do I win you back?'

Gliding to the edge of the pool, she raised herself out of the water, her nude body dramatically lit with wavering underwater light. She strode to a towel draped over the back of one of the many chaise lounges about the pool; wiped her body dry ; saw to her hair with a brush and lit mirror; wrapped herself in bathrobe. 

Finished, she briefly considered the Genom spire that dominated the beacon strewn skyline of Mega Tokyo, an uncharacteristic glower rippling across the surface of her placidity. 'It couldn't be _them_ or _him_ : Priss hates everything about them but their motorcycles.' If not Genom, it was someone else with the considerable connections and capital it took not only to outfit Priss with arcane Gulf  & Bradley technology and attendant support equipment but also camouflage everything from all of Sylia's considerable technological and HUMINT* resources. Turning away from the view, she deactivated the holographic projectors; light patterns altered from a distant, complex skyline to an immediate source of illumination. 

The limestone cavern shone in light. Stalactites and stalagmites glittered; the lake that provided the pool with water reflected with the perfection of false solidity. Far above the range of artificial lighting the only indications of the wreckage chosen to obscure the existence of the underground home were the faint glimmers of the metallic wreckage of abandoned GENOM research facility. Sylia turned away from the natural beauty of the cavern to the inorganic beauty of her subterranean estate.

'I have to do what I swore to her I wouldn't : hunt her down.' She was not unaware of the full potentiality of that turn of phrase. She could only hope to get to Priss before she succumbed to whatever it was that the Gaunt did to its three test subjects fifteen years earlier. They had gone mad, rogue, rampaging insane. Boomer mad with no end but violent death. This was her most recently acquired data regarding the Gulf & Bradley combat suit that the media had come to call the _Gaunt_ ; it was enough to galvanize her into action. The one thing all of the test subjects shared was that they had all gone irreparably mad by the fourth month, and by the eighth, dead. 

There were only two other people in the world that Sylia trusted enough to drag into the only partly deduced dangers of the situation ; she loved them almost too much to expose them to mysterious forces. However, she felt a greater responsibility to Priss. 

'Time to bring all my pieces to bear.'

Within the well lit apartment, Sylia Stingray actuated one of the world’s most guarded communication terminals; placed a call.

A handsomely disheveled Leon McNicol appeared on the telephone screen. In the background, Sylia could hear the kind of bright complaint that only two people within her sphere of acquaintances could make: Romanova & Wong: the masculine sound narrowed the field. 

“Sylia,” His expression went from concerned--for detectives, night calls were seldom good--, to relaxed so quickly as to almost escape Sylia’s notice: “Save me from Daley: he’s a sex fiend!” 

Sylia arched an eyebrow, “And you’re the driven snow?”

Leon grinned.

“Don’t you mean ‘ridden’?

The mental image actually made Sylia flush: she was almost as surprised as Leon; but not nearly as impressed. 

Leon crowed, “I’ve done the impossible!”

Offscreen, Daley’s voice inquired, “Done the what now?”

The view swiveled to show Daley Wong dressed in a flamboyant silk robe. He brought his face in close to the screen.

“You flustered Syl? They’re never going to find our corpses!”

Sylia rallied: “Idiots!” There were only four other people in the world with whom she was this tolerant. “Shut up and let me talk!”

Leon smirked; Daley cuffed him on the back of the head before anything comic could further develop. 

Sylia expended a rare smile for the responsible member of the relationship before continuing, “It’s about the Gaunt.”

That sobered Leon: “That syndicate terrorizing prototype that we’ve been chasing? It’s just an obsolete Boomer type, isn’t it?”

Sylia dropped her bomb with aplomb. “It isn’t: it’s Priss.”

******

In the flare of butane, the face would have been prettier if it had not been haggard. The smolder of cigarillo was kinder to the planes and angles than the blue flare of the lighter. The woman still looked tired, but at least her skin looked alive. She burned through the smoke; pitched the stub on a cometary arc. It doused in the harbor. She watched it snuff ; wondered if she was on a similar tangent. 'Shit, what am I doing?' She watched the filthy water of the Neo-Tokyo bay glow in the sickly light of the sickle moon. 'How can I feel so strong and so weak at the same time? What the hell is that _thing_ doing to me?' She lit a second smoke, quickly killed it ; expended it the same way as its former member of the package. Then, just another shadow, the woman turned away from her view of the wreckage of Aqua City; entered the rooftop door of the warehouse. 

Inside, it was dramatic: the coffin, almost the only thing within the vast space, gleamed under the glare of a spotlight. She wasn't exactly certain when she had started thinking of the containment tube as a coffin, but it seemed somehow _astute._

'Every time I go in _there_ , I leave a bit of myself behind.' As alarming as that thought was, it _did not_ stop her from her next course of action. It hadn't so far : why would it stop her _now?_ '

There were four other things that twitched and hovered in the shadows just beyond the range of the light. They did not concern Priss. It was the _box_ in the dead centre of the warehouse's light that concerned her. She moved towards the dramatically lit container; and, at her touch, the top of the coffin slid open with an unwholesome squelching sound . Under the glaze of illumination, the woman, seen in totality, shed her robe; stood nude, shivered violently, before climbing into the gel laden container. The lid slid back into place with a digestive slurp. Within, everything was the disturbingly warm, wet pulsing dark organic pressure of the gel. Priss steeled herself for what was coming. She thought of it as a shark : some ancient part of her genetic ancestry, the warning sense of a fish that swam ancient seas, detected the approach of predators ; now it sensed the ghosting torpedo nearing, its jagged maw about to do what it did to her every time she climbed into her coffin. Her scream was stopped up in her throat by thick substance as the sharp jagged pain, the sensation of being eaten alive, fired every nerve ending, every neuron, every cell in her body. Over the casket, moment later, a shadow, without a projecting body, stood. It was graceful, featureless, and silent. Within, Priss, a little less sane than a few minutes earlier, felt relieved that the human body possessed zero actual memory of pain. She slid out of the light into darkness, and would have vanished utterly but for the glimpse of two of the perimeter sentinels drawing apart to let something _worse_ pass.

*****

*Human intelligence : human information sources


	2. Fluid Situation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More of the Gaunt; complications arise of both a corporate and explosive nature.

The shade that prowled across the moon frosted roofs of the waterfront was not quite a perfect shadow: its surroundings were crazily reflected in the oily sheen that slithered and slid in constant motion across its smooth and slippery feminine form. Within, Priss revelled in the Gaunt's preternatural potency : she travelled as easily across the night shrouded warren of warehouses, which she perceived as clearly as if it were day, as a jaguar flowed through its rainforest home.

'This is worth 'being eaten by the shark'!' She thought, almost giddily, as she neared the night's objective ; a low slung and windowless building that was more bunker than warehouse.

The guards may have been well trained, but none of them had ever been prepared for the nightmare that effortlessly vaulted into their midst from the roof of the nondescript dept situated next-door. Their first reaction proved lethal to their own: the burst of panicked gunfire dropping a number of their own; and those bullets that did impact the Gaunt had all of the effect of stones dropped into a tar pit. Muzzle flashes and spot lights skittered across the lustrous black body as it slowly, calmly stood from its graceful landing crouch. Surviving guards pulled back in a widening circle as, guns lowered sufficiently to prevent any more friendly-fire kills, they continued to blaze away at the sinister invader. The jet surface rippled and churned under the onslaught without loosing a stance that clearly and silently conveyed contempt. That was where the defenders would have lost all resolve if only the Gaunt and Priss had permitted them their escape. It and she did not.

'These assholes made me kill Sylvie : fuck them all!'

The fight started conventionally : a judo throw sent a guard into three others; all three sprawling. A flurry of pumping fists and feet dropped the others into a ring of insensate flesh and scattered firearms. As it progressed, the wet shadow encapsulating Priss developed a dynamic grace that, the longer it fought, became increasingly uncanny. The onslaught of blows and kicks delivered at first by the normal mechanics of arms, elbows, hands, legs, knees and feet rapidly became too smooth and efficient to be merely human. Then the situation changed.

The feminine slick was rocked by the larger impacts of solid shotgun slugs, quantities of congealed night splashing off of the body, as a second team, much better armed and armored than the first, closed on the Gaunt’s position with the response time of a calculated ambush. Protected by combat armour, the new six person squad proceeded to surround and pound their target with withering firepower. 'They're _learning_ their lessons!' Priss was not unhappy. 'I got so _much_ to teach to these motherfuckers! Keep learning, bastards!' The Gaunt, loosing mass but not proportion under the hailstorm of munitions, abruptly launched its reduced bulk skywards; the squad, caught off guard, staggered its own with unbalancing, harmless fire. That was all the advantage that the Gaunt required.

The installation doors opened to reveal the solid shadow swathed in swirling curls and wafts of gun smoke. Priss et al. entered the facility with an easy and inhuman elegance; the heavy doors slammed shut behind them.

The voice, dry with age, crisped the cold air of the short metallic hall ending in another formidable door :"You're costing me quite a bit, my dear." Priss shrugged the shapely shoulders of the suit, said nothing.'

"It's not the men, and it certainly isn't the money : I have more than enough of both ; more than you could possibly begin to imagine." The conversational tone hardened. "You're costing me _time_ ; I can no longer afford you any more of that _commodity._ " The inner door rumbled slowly, dramatically open to reveal an opulently outfitted open concept apartment. In the centre, upon a spotlit dais, the item Priss had come for glittered ominously. 

"I am not a barbaric man : I just need you out of my way until I am ready, _personally,_ to deal with you. Until then, enjoy your extended stay in your new... _accommodations_ " 

The external features of the Gaunt allowed for no subtleties of human emotion, but within the slick surface, Priss nearly panicked : 'Shit, shit shit!' She had never been worn the BioSuit for more than forty minutes ; she had been clearly warned to stay in it for absolutely no longer than sixty minutes for fear of _dire_ side effects. It was why the entirety of her apparatus was so stealthily mobile : she could get in close enough to ensure target acquisition or neutralization and still have enough time to return to the _coffin_ to doff the Gaunt within operational time parameters. 

Now, however, she was in Chang's trap ; he knew nothing of her _requirement_ ; she had no voice to tell him. He might not care, or he might care enough to ensure that she suffered an extended exposure to the insanities and mental deformations that the BioSuit were known to cause. 

*******

A third party, watching a clandestine feed of the interplay between vigilante and criminal patriarch, chuckled : "What _will_ you do?"

*****

Priss hunted about the lavish living arrangements for a way out, any way out ; found nothing. The time, marked exquisitely by a tabletop amalgamation of anachronistic clockwork, marked the exact passing of her hour's safety limit. At first, she felt nothing : 'Did he lie about over-exposure?' She wondered ; then, she knew for certain he had not.

A sharp flare of pain washed across her consciousness ; she staggered, fell unconscious across the moroccan leather of a sectional couch.

****

Leon McNicol, accompanied by a squad of armored ADP troopers, surveyed the bullet pockmarks and faint but undeniable blood splotches on the pavement outside the warehouse from over the top of his aviator sunglasses. 

'Christ, it's a _war zone_! Somebody sure cleaned up in a hurry : not a single goddamned shell casing and not even a corpse cuticle!' The dozen large stains were death markers ; far too large to be anything but the residue of immediately mortal wounds. He was trying to deduce whether it was a corporate or underworld cleanup operation when the answer was driven up to him in luxury automobiles.

His attention to the crime scene was diverted by a convoy of two sedans escorting a limousine outside of the facility gates. A cordon of burly black suits surrounded and shielded whoever it was that exited the central Genom _Scylla_ Limo.

Leon turned to the ADP squad lieutenant : “Let’s play ‘Name that Genom stooge!’ 

The trooper, unrecognizable from the others with the exceptions of helmet rank bar and his Command & Control comm aerial, turned his red lensed optics towards the detective.

“Sir?”

Two convex copies of Leon’s grin reflected back at him from the lieutenant’s helmet. He thought, wryly, 'God, I can't tell these troopers from Boomers!' 

“I Bet it’s Sakamura: he’s high enough on the Genom shit list to only be trusted with Quincy's morning coffee.”

The trooper shook his head minutely, said nothing; turned back to marshaling his squad's cordoning of the crime scene.

Any other statements from the detective were abruptly cut off when, at the gate, the ring of protective Boomers parted, a sharp featured woman and a wan lab coated technician of indeterminate sex entering the warehouse's grounds. Leon loosed an impressed whistled. 

“What did you do to get kicked out of the pyramid this early in the morning, Madigan?”

“Ah, _Chief_ detective McNicol, _always_ a pleasure.” The slight smile on her angular face suggested that the appreciation was wry. 

“We’re one big old mutual appreciation society, Madigan.” Leon removed his sunglasses , considered the woman with a frank glare. 

“What do you want at _my_ crime scene.”

Madigan held a hand up; the mass manufactured thug to her immediate left placed a scroll tube in her hand. 

“What crime scene, detective?” She handed the tube to McNicol: he opened it, read the very official contents ; repackaged it, tossed it back ; re-parked his sunglasses over eyes that he was afraid might leak some of his actual emotional attitude. 

'Fuck, this is ballsy, even for Genom! Has _he_ completely coopted the government?'

Leon reconstructed his facade of clam. “No crime I can do anything about.” He turned his back on the Genom exec ; addressed his squad.

“Lt., we’re done here: pack it in.”

That was how the Lieutenant liked it: laconic. 

“Sir!” He marshaled his squad back into the big blue personnel carrier. 

Before he entered his own vehicle, a sleek interceptor, Leon tossed his retort at the woman who watched his departure with a aplomb that contained only a smidgen of smug. 

“What makes you _disappear_ , Mags?”

He drove away, the tense features of the woman in his rearview mirror making the tactical retreat more bearable. 

Having granted the detective his face saving retort & retreat, Madigan rearranged her expression : the razor smile lost containment.

“Boring the boss.” 

She turned to the technician. “Are you being paid to loiter?”

He blanched, began to sweep the site with an esoteric device.

****

The woman who tumbled from the fluid embrace of the coffin was almost the same as the one who had fallen unconscious in Chan's condo-trap. Her sprawled body, slick with liquid, seemed reduced, almost translucent in some trick of the harsh light of the warehouse. Behind her, the smaller sarcophagus joined to the side of the unit seemed to seal over something that was far more sinister than any of its users suspected. 

'But I was trapped! How....?'

A lurking sentinel loped to her side, opened itself up with mechanical grace, and drew the almost insensate body within itself; closed gently about her.

Priss was too exhausted, too discombobulated, to be able to do anything but allow herself to be cradled and protected by her motoroid.

The three other guardians, dobermans, sensors twitching, formed up protectively around their gravid companion. Behind them the low slung bulk of a modified Griffin accepted the dual sarcophagus into a rear cavity with a pneumatic moan. Everything and everybody packed, the technological cell exited the warehouse; vanished into the dockside night.

****

The arrow formation of PODs* proceeding the airborne hard-suit squad broke into a ballistic arc over the warehouse before coordinating their balletic purpose: five precisely dye marked holes explosively punctured a pattern in the expanse of warehouse roof; the power armored figures flashed through their color designated entry points.

The silver suit with blue highlights landed four meters off of dead center of the warehouse floorspace ; the accompanying suits settling on abrupt flares of braking jets about her in an outward facing formation of raised, primed weaponry. 

The only remaining sign of recent occupancy, marks where the _coffin_ and its attendant apparatus had disturbed the thick dust, were almost completely erased by the explosive rocket entrance of the team. Only the pattern of tire treads surrounded by four sets of bipedal mechanical tracks were left undisturbed to terminate at a large vehicle bay sliding door.

A gauntlet slid the silvered faceplate up ; Sylia's scowl did not carry to her calm face underneath the sweep of her crystalline ceramic faceplate, but Nené Romanova, the recipient of her boss' look, _knew_ she was put out with her. 

“Your _live feed_....”

The candy floss pink power armored helmet snapped up: The green eyed redhead looked disgusted with herself : “I've been _Cheshired?**_ Fan- _fucking_ -tastic.” An arcane assortment of antennae sprouted from the backpack assemblage of the hard-suit. 

The other two armoured figures adopted different postures : the brown & green highlighted hardsuit slipped into a blithe recline against a support pillar ; The green combat beribboned went all akimbo : "Great, Nené, _really_ great!"

Sylia Stingray waling over to the floor marks, thought : 'Priss wouldn't have relaxed so quickly.' She exercised her leadership in her controlled, sharp manner : "We're still on mission time, ladies. Pull it together ; stand the perimeter."

Both suits snapped to, took up their assignment, vanishing to opposite ends of the warehouse, while, in the middle, Nené continued her electronic deliberations. She reported to Sylia: "Yeah, it's _subtle_ : it's the real signal and coordinates but my onboard timestamp protocol has a ten minute signal delay caused by... _there you are!_! She gestured crushing something in her right gauntlet : "Squish!" 

The silver helmet nodded. "That fits the thermals and prints over here : one wheeled vehicle, possibly a _Griffon_ or _Gorgo_ ; three dobermans and a what looks like a Mk. iv motoroid. Prep for pur...." 

Nené's head encased carapace jerked up ; she shouted, “Synchrotron radiation spike!” 

The heart of the building was abruptly filled with a cylinder of pale blue light, fragments of roof debris within the beam began to waft lazily towards the ceiling. 

Sylia snapped her faceplate down: “Crisis scrub!”

The team exited the structure with an alacrity that only exhaustive training could provide. During the egress, Nene reported, “The structure’s being lased; orbital ballistic insertion: twenty seconds to intersect!”

Sylia wondered, ‘Are things more or less complicated than they seem?’

Well clear, the squad watched a nearly invisible laser guided bomb explode the warehouse seconds before the orbital particle beam achieved its destructive threshold focus, and the ruined structure became a nonexistent one. 

The brown and green hard-suited figure, bathed in the pyre of destruction, turned to the squad leader.

“What just happened?”

Sylia kept her frown out of her voice: “Exactly what it appears to be: a complication.”

The green balayage front and center on on the chestnut hair matched the color of the suit. “That’s so sketchy! Why don’t you just say that you have no idea what’s going on?” 

Sylia cooly eyed the newest member of the team. “Someone’s gone to great lengths and expense to deliver a message.” 

“About?” 

“A good many things.” Sylia engaged her jump jets, blasted from the rooftop.She delivered a final message to the team: “We have satellites on us : enact Dispersal Delta***.” Her lavender armor vanished into the night skyline. 

Vision turned to the green armored woman standing next to her: “Is she always like that?”

“If by ‘that’ you mean mysteriously reserved, yes.”

“That’s exactly what I meant.”

The remaining members of the Knight Sabers split up; vanished into the warren of warehouses.

*****

*Penetration Ordnance Drone : A semi autonomous air capable munition used for breaking through defences.

**Cheshired : Cyberwarfare jargon : To be electronically deceived.

*** Dispersal Delta : One of a prearranged set of plans for throwing off satellite or other forms of observation by scrambling and re-assembling team members at various locations about Neo Tokyo.


	3. Pawns & Kings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two new characters are decanted : a mysterious German, Faust Lustwile, and an even more enigmatic lady Lazarus.

Consciousness returned.

Memory blazed: Regret, horror, longing burst a supernova in her mind. The woman arched against her restraints, and shrieked it all into the chamber that was an odd combination of baroque finery and operating theatre . The emotional charge of the outburst made all but one of the other people in the room cringe : the only one not dressed in surgical scrubs, a sartorially black suited near-skeleton of a man. His only response to the woman's agony was a wry twist of thin lips that, the attendant surgeon, Dr. West, thought was exactly how the Grim Reaper would smile at her come her time ; she shivered.

Almost as if he could read her mind, the German, pinned her with his impossibly blue eyes as, in full view of the entrapped, sweat drenched woman, he drew a skeletal finger across his withered throat.

" _Dispatch_ her again, herr doktor : she ist stubborn, this one ist!" 

Before the woman expired under the effects of anesthesia, she thought, 'I can't even escape them in _death_?' She fixed the final beacons of her fading life force, her still blazing eyes, upon her tormentor; mouthed, “End it!”

He leant down, pushed a wet lock of hair out of her eyes in an obscene parody of gentleness; whispered, without a trace of German accent: “It hasn’t even _started_ yet, darling girl!”

He smiled happily as he watched the woman die for a second time ; when he was sure she was gone, that there was nothing left but an uninteresting mechanism of meat, he turned his gaze, no longer anything but serious, upon the red garbed woman amidst all of the blue scrubbed figures. 

“Die frau ist* an enduring consciousness; und there ist nothing else for it but to continue grinding her down until the overvrite takes hold.”

The chief surgeon’s mouth twisted the fabric of her surgical mask into the parody of a scowl.

“I am a scientist: I refuse to deal with such pseudo scientific twaddle!”

The svelte man considered the doctor wryly.

“You are an _employee_ ; you vill deal accordingly.”

“And if I refuse?”

The rictus mouth widened into a smile that flashed the barest wink of skull white enamel.

“You vill receive firsthand data regarding vhether or not _your_ consciousness vill endure.” 

Dr. West suddenly understood the difference between pure and applied science; she wished he had stayed pure. The flare of terror in her eyes widened Lustwiles’ smile into a fantastically white tombstone toothed grin.

“I am so glad that I vas able to clarify your _living arrangements._ ” 

The grin died down to a dry sickle. 

“Prepare her.” He extended a atrophied appendage towards the corpse, “Oh, and use a double dose of the reagent, herr Doktor**.” He swept from the room with a grace that did not seem possible given his sickly appearance. At the threshold of the richly appointed room-cum-operating theatre, Herr Lustwile made one final theatrical gesture: He swept his arms wide. 

“Xiānshēng*** Chang rewards success!"

He brought both hands together in an evocative crushing motion.

"He can not abide failure!"

With that final communication, Lustwile swept his near skeletal frame from the room.

West turned on her staff with a fury born of mortal terror. “You heard him: get to work!”

****

Well away from the mansion and its voluminous estate, Faust Lustwile, within his limousine, abruptly collapsed into a limp assortment of sharp angles and excellent tailoring. The chauffeur wasn't surprised or alarmed. He knew where to go ; what to do. 

****

Within her collation core, Sylia Stingray’s augmented central nervous system worked in parallel with DAIS^, her less flashy than hard-suit development that was actually far and away the more important of the two achievements: it was the extension of her consciousness that had made the Knight Sabres and all of their gear achievable as opposed to merely dream stuff. This was one of her two greatest secrets. As far as everyone knew, those who knew of it at all, it was simply Sylia’s very powerful, possibly pseudo-conscious personal computer.

Within her augmented consciousness, a chess analogue was developing. A trefoil game board supported three differing sets of pieces arrayed in opening gambits : eight white power pieces minus pawns faced off against a full black component built around a pyramid shaped king; a red set possessed of a full set of pawns, but a double set of rooks at the expense of bishops, crouched protectively about a king topped with a stylized 'C' ; and, in the very centre of the structure stood a blue king with its attendant metallic blue and red queen. 

The pieces began moving in ever increasingly rapid patterns as game after game battled across the grid. Invariably the pieces arrayed about the pyramid-king won the board, but Sylia did not need DAIS to tell her the stark realities of the world. It was the mid-game interactions that interested her : there was a struggle between Genom and the Chang group and somehow Priss was the nexus. Sylia’s concern was twofold as she ran through her metaphorical extrapolation series: could she recover her lost team mate without sacrifice ; and, would that require capitulation with one or both of the contending sides? 

The central pieces always caused havoc, but they never won : they couldn’t. There were too many powers arrayed against them; depending upon the initial variables of each game, they were almost always taken by corporate or criminal elements. Those games where the Knight Sabres managed to recover Priss were _Pyrrhic_ disasters rife with sacrifice plays ; those that relied upon capitulation ended in debacle and double cross. 

Sylia removed her neural interface. There were gaps in her data that was creating too much uncertainty within her projections: she still did not know enough about how the Gaunt or its _benefactor_ were affecting Priss to know if she was still operating according to her extant personality profile. Her model of the Chang Group was solid, but the Genom one had an odd variable, a curiously unbusinesslike wobble, in what was otherwise a dependable predictor.

She thought, disgustedly, 'It's just a game!' She poured herself a glass of red wine from a decanter on the end table next to her swivel chair ; moodily reflected upon the ensuing and increasing intricacies of her life.

****

Daly spooned Leon in a bed that was a hopeless wreck of tangled bed clothes.

“What do you think it means?”

“Madigan?”

“No, my predilection for your chiseled ass!” He thwacked him gently across the aforementioned anatomy. “Of course I mean Madigan!”

“It means that if Sylia is correct, Genom and the Chang syndicate are both after Priss.” 

“That’s too much even for that scary lady.” 

“Yeah.” He gyrated to face his beau : “I figure we’re in for some highly unofficial police work.”

“Damn straight!” 

Leon grinned, planted a kiss on a Wong that was waking up to the comedic quality of his emphatic statement: “Even if we ain’t!” 

Laughing, Daly returned the kiss. “What’s our play?”

“First, we get dressed.”

Daly moued: “This is a terrible plan!”

Leon tossed him his pants. "It's a _great_ plan : Sylia's given us enough info for us to do something _really irresponsibly cool_!"

Daly danced into his pants, commando. "Priss is going to have zero choice but to hit that old secret Gulf  & Bradley industrial espionage facility found in the quake zone!"

Tottering around with one leg in, one leg out of his trousers; Daly grinned : "The one you just concocted out of bullshit and pixie dust?"

A starkers Leon flourished : "The _very_ one!" 

Daly, fully panted, laughed : "It'll need a paper trail and at least some sort of facade to fake our girl out long enough for us to?"

Leon hunted up the far flung articles of his garb. "We bait her; Syl lands her." 

"I'll get on putting together the _leaked_ ADP report and the impending, surely almost immediate HARM*."

Leon, his shirt half buttoned up, applauded : "That's a nice touch, lover : a little time pressure's perfect sauce for the gan...goose! I'll wrangle up the location and liaison with Syl : the combined odds and ends of the Knight Sabres and ADP can stock our little Priss trap with cheese she can't refuse to try to snap up."

With time for a fond little embrace, the two went on their separate ways to lay their trap.

****

Priss Asagiri felt both better and worse than she had in weeks. She had the dream that had been set before her, and the dark power to realize it ; she was willing to commit to all of her commands to even have a chance of recapturing the past, but the costs were heavy.

She missed her friends, the people whom her exile was teaching her were more her _family_ than anything she had ever possessed.

She missed her music ; she did not know _just_ how much she missed it, and how much damage its absence was causing her.

And, always in the darkness just behind her eyes, just beyond her sight, the _Gaunt_ seeped a little more into her flesh, oozed a little more into her mind, trickled a little more into her soul.

She attempted to relax in the den that she had arranged with the spoils of her raids upon the Mega Tokyo underworld holdings. It was a moneyed mess which reflected a lack of unified style or taste on the part of the resident. Certain aspects were top-end : the stereo system was an Alpine-Sakamoto Omega Secundus ; other things were barely adequate : a bare mattress was thrown indiscriminately upon the clothes littered floor. 

Lounging on the mattress, Priss indelicately devoured the final double slice of an extra large oleaginous pizza. She chased it down with a long pull off of a tallboy of Mountain Beaver lager; tossed the empty onto a pile in the far corner of the semi-trailer. She felt filled and tipsy, but she did not feel fulfilled. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that she did not know what to do with the acquired items that her contact had told her were necessary for her new special requirements. She considered the four items she had acquired in her Gaunt raids : an innocuous looking data module, a metal rack containing four ampoules of fluorescent green fluid, a glass containment vessel housing a gelatinous substance ; and strangest of all, a carved, hand sized obsidian tablet crammed full with a weirdly flowing script. Somehow, according to her contact, these four items could be combined to strengthen her use of the Gulf & Bradley BioFluid combat suit. 

Part of her wished that she had never parted ways with Sylia and the others, but she had a new ally now ; she had done well by him, _hadn't she?_

A secret part of her knew otherwise.

**************

* (German) The woman is  
**(German) Mr. doctor  
***(Chinese) Mr.  
^ Data Analysis Interpolation Synthesis

*Harmful Apparatus Recovery Mission : An ADP unit specialized in locating and deconstructing illegal Boomer production & alteration facilities.


	4. Incubus Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Do Replicants Dream of Electric Lambs? Let's find out!

Smoke suspended a fever dream swirl of stage lights that washed over a Priss that, flickering in between her human skin and her crazily reflective _Gaunt_ sheen, belted out a song that she could not bring herself to perform in public because its desolation broke through her anger ; she detested being weak before her audience. This time, however, she was _strong_. 

She was _furious_ ; _Steel Child_ raged out of her with the musical intensity of a finely tuned chainsaw : 

Clenched in cold chromium lies  
A child’s heart writhes in sorrow  
Only I can hear her abject cries  
Only I can give her tomorrow 

The band, distorted in the luminous fog of light and smoke, warped in between human and machine forms as they played an accompaniment that, likewise, shifted uneasily and eerily in between human and machine interpretations of music. 

It was beautiful and oddly, comfortingly transcendent. Then the audience, beyond the glare and fog, resolved ; the dream became a nightmare.

Poetry, metre, composition meant nothing to the attendant horror. The song plummeted into the swaying, mass of tentacles that surged a tortured plasmic metal ocean of roiling horror. Priss, screaming lyrics suddenly distorted by terror, found herself flung airborne in an awful parody of crowd surfing. At the vertex of her flight she morphed into a blue eyed, blonde haired girl.

Only I fail every time I try

Then the sprawl had her. Riding the undulating roil of bio-mechanical chaos, Priss felt the awful annexation that the girl experienced before anyone knew that she was anything more than a little girl in desperate need of rescue. 

Only I fail, every time I die

She awoke: abruptly, sweatily ; shouting the name of someone else she had been unable to save. 

She yanked the sweat stuck sheet from her body, tossed it off the mattress to billow, ghostly ejecta. She stumbled across the trailer lit by the ‘color of [a] television tuned to a dead channel’* to the tiny corner sink and shower cubicle. She fumbled the light, cursed the fluorescent shock ; watched her pupils contract in her sleep pinched face. 

‘Why did I let him talk me into giving up my music?’

She said it out loud ; punctuated it with a fist to her angry reflection. The mirror shattered ; she reconsidered herself through the angular slivers and bloody smear of the wrecked looking glass : now her reflection looked worth a song ; and she was going to sing it. 

To Hell with Faust. 

****

*All cyberpunk works should include at least one W. Gibson homage.


	5. Deceptions & Beguilements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The trap is built, baited and set & sprung.

Four steel spectres stole across the middle darkness in between the empty vivacity of city neon and the full sterility of a sickle moon. 

Sylia, in the lead, consulted her command & control helmet display system : her silver arrowhead led the three sigils of her team and the ponderous signal of the transport across the digital ghost of city map towards what, in her mind, seemed a harebrained and unlikely to succeed plan. Still, it was something more than the odd paralysis she felt regarding her inability to pursue her own chess master projections.

‘Is it that I’m afraid of my own failure , or of potentially loosing my entire team, or….’ Fortunately, the myriad demands of command kept her from dwelling upon the final, probable reason : it twitched just outside of the ordered reason of the consciousness of Sylia Stingray ; it waited. 

“ _Gladius_ , loose altitude ; you’re approaching radar threshold. _Falchion_ , _Epée_ ; correct for lateral drift : stick with _Dirk_.” She shook her head. “Tighten the formation.” 

Her HUD*, updated literally on the fly by a nearly invisible network of high altitude micro drones, indicated a precise balletic series of vector modifications that produced the calm satisfaction within her that, as of late, had been as elusive as her former, endangered, team member. 

To reduce the chances of communication intercepts, Sylia cycled her C&C** suite laser communication system from Argon to Xenon ; beamed two datum points to her team : encoded within the blue tight-beam signal directed in a rapid four pronged pattern was a validation of the course corrections, and a revelation of the team’s final navigation point.

“The quake zone? She’s in there?” That was the newest member of the team, Reika Chang, who had replaced Priss as an even more wayward assault specialist. 

Sylia kept her reply laconic : “Potentially.” 

Chang dug : “Your gay cop buddies tipped you off?” 

Sylia countered : “My trusted friends, _Gladius_.”

Reika put a shrug in her voice : “If you trust them….” 

Sylia Stingray rolled her eyes within her inscrutable insect helmet. What was she going to do with two pugnacious personalities? She interrupted Chang’s nascent insolence with a waggish riposte. 

“I can also trust a reclusive pop star vigilante.” 

Reika chuckled : “Touché!”

The team flew on into the desolate moon washed wreckage of destroyed city. 

****

Leon opened the pneumatic rear hatch of the battered, decommissioned ADP APC ; started hauling out bits and pieces of hastily gathered technology into the ruined gloom of a thickly walled bunker like building that looked like it might have actually been home to something illicit. 

“The best part of this plan is that it we can be slapdash about it!”

Daly, arranging an impressive display of castoff office computer equipment, grinned in assent.

“Yeah, it’s not like it’s supposed to be an _official_ Gulf  & Bradley facility : we’d need at least another half an hour’s work to make that a thing!”

Dragging a dented and gutted K-12 suit out of the back of the transport, Leon laughed.

“Priss wouldn’t know a night club from a think tank!” 

“But her controller would.”

The men started : Leon dropped the empty shell with a clang and a puff of concrete powder ; Daly jumped, tossing a haphazard stack of old data discs into a wee skeet shooters delight of flying saucers. 

Chuckling, Sylia led her team out of the shadowed wreckage at the front of the building. 

She observed, dryly : “It looks like you need help.” 

****

The man, enshrouded within the translucent concealment of a full body telepresence suit, leaned forward in his museum quality Eames lounge chair, his eyes studying multiple CRT displays one of which exhibited a live stream of ADP data.

He barked a laugh. “A clandestine Gulf & Bradley corporate espionage facility that just happens to conform exactly to the time of their BioSuit prototype tests? How can I deny such an entertainingly obvious trap!” The man leaned back into. He lifted a headset from its cradle, placed it upon his brow ; eyes closed, leant back into the chair.

As he reached out with electronic extensions of his will, he thought: ’Maybe my brutal little engel will scare up something _interesting_!’ 

****

upon a cherubic complexity of membranous wings, an oddly liquid humanoid pattern of radiant night flew low over the jumbled rooftops of earthquake destroyed city. within the central mass of cogent fluid, Priss wondered at two things : the ease with which she used the suit and the ease of which the suit used her. It didn’t even feel like a suit anymore. Indeed, as she had put it on this very evening, she no longer perceived the odd interface set projected upon the opposite side of the eyeball than the Heads Up Displays of her Knight Sabres days. There would have been more worry regarding the evolutions in her relation with the BioSuit but for the comforting and near constant endorphin rush she felt within its warm, uterine clutch. 

Still, as whatever it was she was becoming neared the destroyed structure that she somehow knew to be her target, there was a part of her, a small terrified part that quailed within its horrendous prison ; cried out for the gentler days of survivable horror.

Priss wasn’t even sure why she was agreeing to pursue a mission that, hours before, she had sworn off of completing ; now she flew through the night sky on Queen Mab wings towards a goal that seemed both very simple and entirely obscure. A heady pulse of pleasurable brain chemistry washed all but the faintest terror aside ; she continued her way towards the hunger of her/its target. 

****

Dispersed around the bait site, the members of the stakeout engaged in various methods of time killing : Leon and Daly played a deferred form of strip poker that they called _Rain Check_ which they engaged in as much to entertain themselves as they did to titillate Linna and Nene. 

Leon, holding nothing more than a pair of twos, audaciously declared, “I see your shirt and raise you trousers!”

Daly, in possession of a Royal Flush, kept an almost straight face as he almost seriously said, "I see your trousers and raise you boxers!"

Leon quipped, "Bikini briefs, you mean?"

"Whatever you're wearing, goof!"

Linna giggled, and Nene whispered conspiratorially to her teammate, “Leon’s terrible at poker!”

Linna tittered in reply, “Who cares about the cards?”

Sylia’s smile, far down within her consciousness, did nothing to disturb her placid exterior as, crouched next to her brother, she watched the luminous emerald patterns of Mackie’s detection equipment.

Suddenly, Sylia’s head snapped up ; her eyes uncharacteristically wide : “She’s coming!”

Mackie, fussing over the green illumination of a bulky multi band detection unit, declared, “What? I’ve got nothing but a dragonfly patrol ten kilometres to the northwest.”

Sylia’s eyes returned to their usual cool indifference : “That’s too close : redirect them.” 

Mackie, shrugged, played with the radio controls, consulted the data glowing across his CRT ; deployed his best ADP dispatcher voice : “Patrol Sierra Goose Lambda, investigate Double Three Nineteen in progress at grid coordinates….”

The assembled Knight Sabres stared at a Sylia who again abruptly descended into a vacant, almost subliminal fugue state. 

“She’s here.” She said it in a voice so calm as to be spookier than if she had been panicky. “Get ready to collapse the trap.”

****

Gladius: Reika Chang  
Falchion: Linna Yamazaki  
Epée : Nene Romanova  
Dirk : Mackie Stingray  
Cutlass : Sylia Stingray

 

*Heads Up Display  
**Command and Control


	6. Threshold Terror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Priss & Sylia both become more aware of the Gaunt and what it can do.

There was so little disturbance of the ubiquitous snowfall of powdered ferrous concrete and debris when the oddly difficult to perceive female form landed that all of the observers had a hard time believing that it was actually there and not some intangible nightmarish phantom. 

Priss surveyed the lunar wreckage of the quake jumbled building. It didn’t look special in any way, but it was supposed to be some sort of secret industrial espionage installation : it was probably made to appear as mundane as possible. She walked towards the shadows within collapsed entrance, her new enhanced senses sweeping the premises for signs of anything promising. Sure enough, she was picking up power signatures in the immediate area. She moved towards the closest signature with a rapid grace that brought her upon the shockingly familiar sight of silver and blue hardsuit before the wearer had a chance to even move. 

The two women stood frozen in a standoff tableau. 

Sylia’s optic nerve had a difficult time simply perceiving the figure that was, with the exception of faint urban ambient light, was essentially almost indistinguishable from the surrounding darkness. However, she didn’t require her eyes to know Priss was there ; she felt it on a receptive frequency that had nothing to do with any science or technology with which she was familiar. 

Priss found herself confounded : ‘Shit, I can’t remove the suit outside of the coffin!’ She concentrated on finding a solution ; found it happening literally organically as she thought how to reveal herself to her previous leader : she was apparently willing the external configuration of the Gaunt into her likeness, but there was a resistance. Then the pearl of fear that had been slowly accruing around her initial speck of unease for her situation cast its lustre into her consciousness ; she understood the terrible truth.

She thought, ‘It’s going to make me kill her!’ 

Sylia, witnessing the contested metamorphosis of the wet shadow, and was even more alarmed than she had dared to consider : the Priss she knew, the wayward woman, was occupied. That was the word that rose disturbingly within Sylia’s mind. Another consciousness was within Priss : something as dark and hard to perceive as was its physical form. From out of that nearly engulfing blackness, Sylia glimmered a paradoxical signal of strength and terror. 

Behind the stoic frontier of her placid surface chemistry, Sylia felt a sudden and surprising surge of desperate love for the woman she now knew, God only knew how, to be trapped.

She raised her visor, cried : “We’ll beat this, Priss! Hold on!”

Sylia’s armour, distorted liquidly, reflected in the midnight mercury of , was joined by the smaller mirrored parodies of her compatriots as they, too, rose from their places of concealment. the head swirled back and forth in between a parody of familiar facial features and the Gaunt’s featureless liquid carapace. Then the figure staggered, and the battle went to the Gaunt. 

Sylia shouted, “Fight it!”

A strangled sound, oddly and horrifically liquid, bubbled out and was abruptly silenced as the last trace of identity was erased from the thing. It regarded Sylia with a head tilt that somehow conveyed an amused predatory curiosity ; then, with impossible swiftness, it sprang at her. Sylia had the indistinct, horrifying, impression of being an insect on the receiving end of a mounting pin, and was rammed by twin forces : a brutal physical slam overlaid by rage propelled her savagely to collapse the remnants of a wall.

Before she passed out, Sylia realized that the wrath she had felt had not been directed towards her. Her final thought before darkness took her was very Sylia : a wry yet feeling, “Of course her love token would be not killing me.”


	7. Beasts of Prey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two women are in the process of changing : one towards improvement ; the other towards deceit. Which is which?

A haggard Priss haunted the shadows of downtown. Tired, Loose tied business men stumbled out her way and swanky club scene kids parted unthinkingly around her barracuda presence before forming up again into their garish, sequin and piercing winking schools in her wake. Priss was oblivious. She was too busy keeping her Shark at bay with the one thing it couldn’t handle.

Music. 

It had been what had allowed her to save Sylia. She had blunted the deadly lance that it had fashioned her into ; the impact, bad as it was, was not killing force. She wasn’t ready to deal with the awful fact that the metaphor of her being consumed alive by the Shark was not a metaphor at all, but rather a cold, relentless truth. So she stalked the streets, her mind tightly focussed inwards on her defensive musical compositions. The rest of the mind and body of the woman ran on autopilot ; it took her towards territory suited to her needs.

Her legs carryed her closer to the collection of musical venues in the rundown southern edge of the downtown known locally as the Swan Dives. The words and their associated images rose in between her and the sinewy phantom of the Shark as it ghosted away further down into her sub consciousness. 

Inside my mind, my monsters possess  
Bloody tigers slash, torpedo sharks feast  
Of freedom, peace, release I obsess  
I fight with my sole weapon against beasts  
My Music will deliver me  
My Music will set me free

Priss felt the smooth passage of the Shark diving further away from her consciousness, driven away by some quality of her musical being into the depths of her subconscious mind. She would had welcomed some recognizable form of dismay or hurt from its presence ; but her mental conception of it was too accurate for that : it had the monstrous patience and the unruffled assurance of a great white shark. 

She reached into her jacket pocket, dry swallowed an amphetamine ; thought about nothing else but maintaining her musical fortress. 

****

The woman awoke. 

There was a faint sense of someone else which skittered away from her awareness like a roach avoiding light. Her faint scowl shifted to a grim little smile. 

"Are you my _humanity_?" 

Chuckling, Chimera Chang rose naked from the almost unruffled bed of a deep sleeper ; shrugged herself into a robe held out by a obsequious piece of the room’s human furniture ; walked across the large room, through open french doors, and sat at the breakfast ladened table on a balcony overlooking the red cliffs of Capracia, Tuscany. She was musing about how best to handle a situation involving a middle management aspect of the organization once she took power, and then the local ecosystem provided her with the solution.  


A peregrine falcon, wheeling high against the disc of the sun, dove ; rose again, a squirming rabbit in its talons. Chimera raised her mimosa to the raptor.

“Eat him alive.” Her smile was as cruel as the falcon’s scimitar beak. 

*****


	8. Dreams & Awakenings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To the relief of the remnants of her family, Sylia revives ; Priss tries to build something of a new life.

Sylia dreamed.

She soared over a mountain chain that tore black, snow bare peaks into a sky of preternatural blue. Words arose in her thoughts, clues to her form : membranous, amorphous, monstrous ; these should have been her focus. They weren’t. 

The mountains devoured her attention : there was something about their geography.

No, that was the wrong word.

There was terror in their _geometry_.

Sylia startled awake, bolted up in her bed 

Nené, who had been wiping the damp brow of the dreamer mumbling about mountains, startled backwards, toppled, arms windmilling, onto her backside. The combined yells of the wakened and the fallen brought the others, with the exception of Reika, running into the room. The newest member of the team didn't feel enough emotional attachment to Sylia's condition to do anything more than lean against the doorjamb and watch the unfolding drama.

Caught up in the complex confusions of cleverly contrived teen life, Mackie burst into the room with mostly genuine concern for his older sister, but with also a hint of _skin_ terest. 

“Sis, you’re awake!” And in a babydoll _glued_ to your bod!

Sylia’s eyes focussed on something through him for the second that it took to completely banish any horny teenage drives : She doesn’t even see me!

Then she blinked, her pinprick pupils dilated ; her gaze focussed. 

“Mackie, what’s…” 

Upset by the uncharacteristic weakness of the most self assured person he knew, Mackie Stingray threw his arms around his surprised sister and wept. 

“You can’t be like this, Syl : where’s my strong sis?”

Sylia held the back of his head and cradled him to her breast while still looking baffled. 

“She’s right here!” She cast a questioning look over his head at Linna and Nené both of whom stood at the threshold of the bedroom. 

Linna began, “You were out for seventy-two hours. Dr. Moreau removed what he called a _foreign substance_ from you and said something about you being fine in the morning.”

Sylia shivered. Had he gotten all of it? Or had it been _her_ , and what were the implications of _that_?

Nené continued : “That was _two_ days ago! We were getting ready to take you to the _hospital_!”

Linna considered her boss with a serious expression which impressed Sylia with the weight of the worry which had burdened the three people gathered about bedridden body. Sylia gathered her strength to do what she had been designed to do…by father : lead.

“Stop fussing over me : I’ll be fine!” All three did look exhausted, sleep bruised eyes and slightly slouched postures. Get out, get some sleep!” She shooed them from the room before collapsing back onto the sweat dampened pillow.

*****

The shabby, night shrouded room was almost entirely taken up by a mattress. The only other items lit by failing neon sputtering through a dirty window, were a small fridge, a hotplate and two sleeping nudes, one draped across the other. 

Priss gasped awake, her nude body slippery with sweat. She recalled the dream in lurid detail : she’d been some sort of formless horror soaring high over snow clad mountains that she somehow knew were the ruins of an impossible city. There was something else, the thing that had shocked her awake : within the shapeless slime, she had not been alone. There had been…something within her mind recoiled in horrified spasm, the realization was lost deep within the coils of her brain. 

The skinny woman who twitched up against her was far too blitzed on a cocktail of Slug* and the extreme languor following the system kick of Glow** to do anything more than murmur uneasily and gently press her shock of dyed blonde hair against Priss’ slick thigh. Smiling down at the Priss smoothed the roughly cut mane, the sleeper settled with a happy little exhalation, lay quietly. 

I may not be able to anything about my demon…

She felt the deep water stirrings of the Shark, countered with a sudden snatch of song lyrics inspired by her new fondness for the sleeper. 

Love’s not a gentle, fawning lull  
That’s a thing for poets, fools, the weak  
Love’s a ferocious, killing cull  
The slaughter is never for the meek  
Love’s defence must be violent and bold  
Or the world will snuff it out bloody and cold

It’s the fucking fight  
Keeps the blaze alight 

The torpedo presence dove deeper to escape whatever it was about her music that it could not endure, and Priss felt that splinter of happiness still left to her. 

**********

*Slug is raw ethanol. Archaic terms : moonshine, hootch, firewater. 

**Glow is a synthetic steroid designed to supercharge endorphin production. It was originally produced as the sports enhancing drug, Enhantrix, but the pleasure centre effects quickly led to its being used as a sex enhancer.


End file.
